Daughter of an American mother and a Scottish father. She grew
up in New York, Paris and London. When she was nine her father
died and her mother returned with her from Paris to England.
She even tried to declare her daughter insane to get her hands
on her money. But the court in England protected Pauline (her
real name) and when she was 21 she permanently moved to Paris.

In
Paris she was notorious for her dress, her poems and most of
all for being openly lesbian. At first she wrote in English,
later in French. Her lifelong obsession for her childhood friend
Violette Shillito remained unconsumated, but she had widely
published affairs with Natalie Barney and Helene von Zuylen
de Nyeveld (born Helene de Rothschild, their affair started
in 1901). She loved fresh flowers and she especially loved violets
because they reminded her of her friend, who died in 1901. She
was called 'Muse of Violets' by others.

She was financially
well off and her apartment was filled with furniture and art
from the Far East. She had travelled to Egypt and China. She
had even attempted to start a colony for lesbian poets at Lesbos
together with Natalie Barney, but when she was in Greece Helene
came to her to 'reclaim her'. Her relationship with Helene started
in 1901 and ended when Helene broke it off in 1906.

Her
luxerious lifestyle left her deeply in debt by 1908 and she
tried to kill herself in London by drinking an overdose of laudanum.
She survived, but suffered from pleurisy and back in Paris she
had to walk with a cane. The pleurisy, in combination with drinking
heavily and starving herself proved fatal: she died in 1909.
Nathalie Barney came to visit her, only to hear that 'mademoiselle
had just died'.

Her admirer Salomon Reinach seems
to have locked up her papers in the Biliothèque Nationale in
Paris to hide her lesbian habits from the public and protect
her name as a poet. But her work was already outdated when she
wrote it because symbolism had peaked twenty years before. She
soon faded into obscurity and only in the 1970s her work was
published in English.